As I’ve mentioned, I hate goodbyes. Of any kind. Finality terrifies me. Thus, because New Year’s Eve focuses on what is essentially the death of a year, and celebrates the birth of a new one, it’s probably not surprising that I am always depressed at this time. Especially since for the 35th year or so in a row, I won’t be invited to any parties.
I used to look forward to New Year’s Eve. I went to some great New Year’s Eve parties, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ones where you didn’t feel embarrassed about getting uproariously drunk, because everyone was uproariously drunk. When midnight hit, I thrilled at kissing every female at the party. I mean real, French kisses. It was exciting. I can’t picture such a thing happening in America 2.0. I guess it was the times, but I never had any girl protest, or hesitate in the least when I drunkenly shouted, “Happy New Year!” before embracing them, Clark Gable style. I wasn’t that irresistible. I was turned down plenty when asking girls to dance. New Year’s Eve midnight kissing was an expected custom that everyone followed, like Eskimos providing visitors with their wives to sleep with.
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I looked forward to New Year’s Eve, even after the petite nurse I’d been dating told me, in a conversation on the front lawn of a party during a rainstorm, that she wanted to date my best friend. New Year’s Eve 1978. Happy New Year to me. It inspired me to write a few more self-pitying songs and poems. But there weren’t many more memorable New Year’s Eve parties after that one. People I knew were becoming involved in serious relationships, including me. You tend to be less understanding of all that kissing and flirting going on, when you’re committed to one person. My wife and I had fun on New Year’s Eve throughout the 1980s, but it wasn’t quite the same.
I quit smoking cigarettes in January, 1989. My wife was pregnant with our first child, and had quit smoking herself. She told me I could keep smoking, but not in the house. Since my workplace had just started banning smoking inside the facility, I figured the writing was on the wall. I always claimed I would stop smoking at age thirty. I was thirty two, so I came pretty close. I still recall grinding out my last cigarette, while watching the Morton Downey Show, which was experiencing its fifteen minutes of fame. After that, if I tried to drink any alcohol, my urge to smoke increased dramatically. Any smoker will tell you that for some reason, drinking alcohol makes you smoke a lot more. So I stopped drinking, too. Nobody likes a sober party animal.
So from that moment on, New Year’s Eve became something I stopped looking forward to. It’s not the same thing, watching the ball drop in Times Square, with a few family members in your recreation room. No strange drunken women to kiss. And with sobriety, at least for me, comes the realization that each year brings me closer to the end of the line. Although I feel the same as I did when I was fourteen, and some would say I still have an adolescent emotional level, I can’t ignore the numbers. Even if I don’t see the aging process clearly in the mirror, I can see everyone else around me getting older. It’s scary, and each New Year drums home the reality.
I think of my brother even more on New Year’s Eve. He would get so psyched up about the yearly Twilight Zone marathon on the sci-fi channel. He’d ask me which ones I had watched (for the zillionth time), and talk about the ones he’d seen. That classic television show was one of the few things that could hold his interest. Ricky would invariably call me, exactly at midnight, before I’d had a chance to eat the dozen grapes my wife insists we eat for good luck. I was ready to get angry at him, as usual, when he called on his last New Year’s Eve, but thankfully my wife calmed me down a bit before I picked up the phone. I’m sure I was still too abrupt with him, but her advice helped assuage the guilt I felt when he died twenty days later.
I think of all the ones who won’t be here in 2024. Not just Ricky, who will be gone two years on January 20. But people like Tae Kim, or as we all called him, Mr. Kim. I was shocked to learn last week that he had died two years ago. Mr. Kim worked with me in IT for over twenty years. I grew to love him, even though he had no concept of the technology- we would joke that he seemed to think there were tiny men inside the computers. He used to bring his mail into work, and have me look at it. He didn’t understand a lot of things, and was too proud for his wife and children to know that. I was happy to help him, and started calling myself his number three son. He was in incredible shape- still playing soccer at age eighty. I can only assume he went into the hospital like my brother, and was killed by COVID protocol. No other explanation.
Ever since 2020, when the Greatest Psyop in the History of the World began, the subsequent years blend together, in some kind of Orwellian haze. Remember when all the memes joked about everyone being anxious for 2020 to end? So that things would return to “normal?” 2021, 2022, and 2023 have been progressively worse. So many ugly earmarks of tyranny are now ingrained in our rigged system. The Alex Jones and Donald Trump show trials are setting precedents to prosecute any and every Thought Criminal left in the land. Most Americans accept that there is “hate speech,” and that Hate Speakers should be prosecuted. First they were subject to public ridicule, then the loss of their job, and now to the long arm of our ludicrous “law.”
Millions agree that “misinformation” and “disinformation” must be combated. Not by renegade historians like me, but by the authoritarian leaders who promote it continuously. So anyone who questions authority is now promoting “disinformation” or “misinformation.” I’m not sure of the distinction between the terms, but both are now serious offenses. Unlike violent crime, which is largely being overlooked by the same “Woke” prosecutors who want to throw the book at dissenting enemies of the corrupt state. What one thinks or says now is far more important than what they do. The political beliefs of the J6 prisoners are why they are being subjected to such cruel and unusual punishment. And why the BLM rioters aren’t.
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The major events of 2023 get quickly forgotten. For example, the curious fires in Hawaii. You know, with the mayor that was also the police chief. And allegations that police were stopping people from moving to safety. That’s yesterday’s news, like the Titanic submersible and the Chinese spy balloon. Or the environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. The last I heard, the water and wildlife had been poisoned. Ask Greta Thunberg about that. Yet another unfairly convicted defendant was just released from prison after serving nearly fifty years for a crime he was finally proven not to have committed. He was Black, for what it’s worth. That’s usually of crucial importance in America 2.0, but it didn’t garner any outrage from the usual suspects. Where was Al Sharpton? Or the Congressional Black Caucus?
2023 saw the interesting presidential candidacies of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy. RFK Jr. lost a lot of credibility by his wildly over the top crush on the state of Israel. His enthusiasm didn’t wane, even with the monstrously disproportionate attacks on the Palestinians after the dubious events of October 7. Now he’s pretty much disappeared. Vivek has been mostly very impressive, but again just can’t quite pull the trigger on hearty, justifiable criticism of Israel. But he is more even-handed than the rest, and he had my book Hidden History on the bookshelf behind him during his interview with Alex Jones. How could I not like that?
So we’re left with the likes of Nikki Haley, who should theoretically have been pressured out of the race after her recent rambling response to the question of what caused the Civil War. Her answer was closer to the truth than I would ever have anticipated, but she made the cardinal mistake of not shouting “Slavery- of course!” in a millisecond. She has, naturally, issued the standard apology. Unlike all the hapless White men over the past fifty years or so, she isn’t being “cancelled.” The establishment would love to have neocon Nikki as the Stupid Party nominee. For the real story on our Civil War, read my book Crimes and Cover-Ups in American Politics: 1776-1963. History is always written by the victors.
Who knows what they have planned politically for 2024? Will the barely functioning Joe Biden be cast aside? Will it be Michelle Obama to the rescue? Why would any Republicans vote at this point? In most districts and states, they are given horrific RINOs as the option to the tyrannical “Woke” Democrat. And the strong indications of massive fraud from both the 2020 and 2022 elections remain unaddressed. In fact, former President Trump is being prosecuted for complaining about it. It’s only Trump, so why worry? It’s not like they’d ever prosecute an average citizen for complaining about the vote. Give them sentences of up to twenty two years. Hold them behind bars, in solitary confinement, and deny them all due process.
